God, let's leave the idiot child of human engineering (eugenics) out of this.
I can almost forgive the early twentieth century for its idiocy, but this is a computer science heavy board and evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm. Reducing variation in the population (eg, killing/sterilizing "stupid" people) just clusters your population more tightly, which makes it prone to getting stuck on local maximums.
It's almost acceptable if you lived before DNA was understood and either thought that the evolutionary landscape was perfectly sloped upward or our genome involved continuous "factors" that could be "concentrated", but nowadays we know that DNA comes in discrete chunks (genes) and that the edit distance between two good versions of a gene can be greater than one (eg, you might need three mutations to get from good gene A to better gene B, and it passes through less-good genes C & D to get there).
Eugenics is entirely a short-term gain: you entrench your population solidly in a local maximum, which gives you a higher average than before, but prevents you from ever reaching a higher non-local maximum.
(And that's assuming that your environment is stable and your selection function was well-chosen.)
I can almost forgive the early twentieth century for its idiocy, but this is a computer science heavy board and evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm. Reducing variation in the population (eg, killing/sterilizing "stupid" people) just clusters your population more tightly, which makes it prone to getting stuck on local maximums.
It's almost acceptable if you lived before DNA was understood and either thought that the evolutionary landscape was perfectly sloped upward or our genome involved continuous "factors" that could be "concentrated", but nowadays we know that DNA comes in discrete chunks (genes) and that the edit distance between two good versions of a gene can be greater than one (eg, you might need three mutations to get from good gene A to better gene B, and it passes through less-good genes C & D to get there).
Eugenics is entirely a short-term gain: you entrench your population solidly in a local maximum, which gives you a higher average than before, but prevents you from ever reaching a higher non-local maximum.
(And that's assuming that your environment is stable and your selection function was well-chosen.)